Fortification

Fortification, in military science, any work erected to strengthen a position against attack. Fortifications are usually of two types: permanent and field. Permanent fortifications include elaborate forts and troop shelters and are most often erected in times of peace or upon threat of war. Field fortifications, which are constructed when in contact with an enemy or when contact is imminent, consist of entrenched positions for personnel and crew-served weapons, cleared fields of fire, and obstacles such as explosive mines, barbed-wire entanglements, felled trees, and antitank ditches.

Both field and permanent fortifications often take advantage of natural obstacles, such as canals and rivers, and they are usually camouflaged or otherwise concealed. Both types are designed to assist the defender to obtain the greatest advantage from his own strength and weapons while preventing the enemy from using his resources to best advantage.

This article discusses military fortification since the introduction of rifled artillery and small arms. For discussions of fortification up to the modern era, see military technology.

In the American Civil War, field fortifications emerged as an essential of warfare, with both armies employing entrenchments to an extent never before seen. Troops learned to fortify newly won positions immediately; employing spades and axes carried in their packs, they first dug rifle pits and then expanded them into trenches. Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee adopted the frontier rifleman’s breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet of the entrenchment, and many of Lee’s victories were the result of his ability to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and maneuver. Two notable sieges, that of Vicksburg, Miss., in the west, and Petersburg, Va., in the east, were characterized by the construction of extensive and continuous trench lines that foreshadowed those of World War I. In the Cold Harbor, Va., campaign, when General Ulysses S. Grant sent his troops against Confederate earthworks, he lost 14,000 men in 13 days. Field mines and booby traps were used extensively, and trench mortars were developed to lob shells into opposing trenches.

The lesson taught by accurate, long-range fire from entrenched positions in the American Civil War was lost on European commanders. Even the bitter experiences of appalling losses in the Crimean, Franco-German, and South African (Boer) wars failed to lessen an ardour for the theory of the offensive that was so fervent as to leave little concern for defensive tactics in the field. Few took notice of the immense casualties the Turks inflicted from behind field fortifications in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and even though the Russo-Japanese War soon after the turn of the century underscored the lethal power of the machine gun and breech-loading rifled artillery, most European commanders saw the increased firepower as more a boon to the offensive than to the defensive.

The fallacy of the faith in offensive firepower was soon convincingly demonstrated. Once the French had checked the German right wing at the Marne River, the fighting degenerated into what was in effect a massive siege. For 600 miles (1,000 kilometres), from Switzerland to the North Sea, the landscape was soon scarred with opposing systems of zigzag, timber-revetted, sandbag-reinforced trenches, fronted by tangles of barbed wire sometimes more than 150 feet (45 metres) deep and featured here and there by covered dugouts providing shelter for troops and horses and by observation posts in log bunkers or concrete turrets. The trench systems consisted of several lines in depth, so that if the first line was penetrated, the assailants were little better off. Rail and motor transport could rush fresh reserves forward to seal off a gap faster than the attackers could continue forward. Out beyond the trenches and the barbed wire was a muddy, virtually impassable desert called no-man’s-land, where artillery fire soon eliminated habitation and vegetation alike. The fighting involved masses of men, masses of artillery, and masses of casualties. Toxic gases—asphyxiating, lachrymatory, and vesicant—were introduced in a vain effort to break the dominance of the defense, which was so overpowering that for more than two years the opposing lines varied less than 10 miles in either direction.

During the winter of 1916–17, the Germans prepared a reserve trench system, the Hindenburg Line, containing deep dugouts where the men could take cover against artillery fire and machine guns emplaced in concrete shelters called pillboxes. Approximately two miles behind the forward line was a second position, almost as strong. The Hindenburg Line resisted all Allied assaults in 1917, including a vast British mining operation under the Messines Ridge in Belgium that literally blew up the ridge, inflicting 17,000 casualties at one blow; the advance failed to carry beyond the ridge.

Permanent fortification, 1914–45

World War I

Most defensive thinking on the eve of World War I was reserved for the permanent fort, which was designed to canalize enemy advance and to afford time for national mobilization. The leading fortification engineer of the time was a Belgian, Henri Brialmont. He placed his forts, built of concrete, at an average distance of four miles from a city, as with 12 forts at Liège, and at intervals of approximately 2.5 miles. At Antwerp his defense system was even more dense. He protected the big guns of his forts with turrets of steel and developed disappearing cupolas. Some forts were pentagonal, others triangular, with much of the construction underground.

In building defenses along the frontier facing Germany, French engineers emulated Brialmont, with particularly strong clusters of fortresses at Verdun and Belfort. So monstrous were the forts of the time that they were known as “land battleships.” But by marching through Belgium with a strong right wing (the Schlieffen plan), the Germans circumvented the powerful French fortresses. Passing between the forts at Liège, which Brialmont had intended to be connected with trenches, they took the city in only three days, then systematically reduced the forts. Namur, also heavily fortified, resisted the powerful Big Bertha guns for only four days. The concrete of the Belgian fortifications crumbled under the pounding, but the French forts at Verdun, of more recent and sturdier construction, later absorbed tremendous punishment and served as focal points for some of the war’s bloodiest fighting.

In the interval between world wars, several European countries built elaborate permanent fortifications. The largest was the French Maginot Line, a system of mammoth, self-contained forts stretching from Switzerland to the vicinity of the Belgian frontier near Montmédy. The reinforced concrete of the forts was thicker than any theretofore used, the disappearing guns bigger and more heavily armoured. Ditches, embedded steel beams, and minefields guarded against tank attack. A large part of the works were completely underground. Outposts were connected to the main forts by concrete tunnels. But, because French and British military leaders were convinced that if war came again with Germany the Allies would fight in Belgium, the French failed to extend the line to the sea, relying instead on an outmoded system of unconnected fortresses left over from before World War I. It was this weakness that the Germans subsequently exploited in executing a modified version of the Schlieffen plan, cutting in behind the permanent defenses and defeating France without having to come to grips with the Maginot Line.

The Germans confronted that portion of the Maginot Line facing the Saar River with fortifications of their own, the West Wall. Later extended northward to the Dutch frontier and southward along the Rhine to Switzerland, the West Wall was not a thin line of big forts but a deep band, up to five miles thick, of more than 3,000 small, mutually supporting pillboxes, observation posts, and troop shelters. For passive antitank defense the line depended upon natural obstacles, such as rivers and lakes, and upon “dragon’s teeth,” five rows of pyramid-shaped reinforced concrete projections.

The Germans did not rely on the West Wall to halt an attack but merely to delay it until counterattacks by mobile reserves could eliminate any penetration. The value of their concept remains undetermined; the line was not attacked until late 1944, after the German armies had incurred severe defeats and lacked adequate reserves. The West Wall nevertheless forced Allied troops into costly attacks to eliminate it.

Other fort series

Elsewhere in World War II many fortifications similar to these two basic types were built. The Italians constructed a series of new fortifications and modernized existing World War I defenses along the country’s mountainous northern and northeastern frontiers; the Finns maintained a World War I defense facing the Soviet Union, the Mannerheim Line (named after a Finnish marshal and statesman); the Soviets built the Stalin Line facing Poland; the Czechoslovaks constructed what became known as the Little Maginot Line to oppose Germany; the Greeks built the Metaxas Line facing Bulgaria; and the Belgians erected a series of elaborate forts along the Albert Canal. German capture of the most elaborate and allegedly impregnable of the Belgian forts, Eben Emael, in a matter of hours in the first two days of the campaign against France and the Low Countries in 1940 startled the world. Arriving silently on the night of May 10 in gliders, troops landed atop the fort and began systematically to destroy turrets and casemates. Soon after daylight they were joined by 300 men arriving by parachute. Around noon of May 11 the 1,000-man garrison surrendered.

Despite at least comparable surprise and the same so-called blitzkrieg methods, the Germans required more time to penetrate the more dispersed forts of the Stalin Line in the Soviet Union. The delay gained two months of invaluable time for the Soviet troops, without which they might well have been unable to stop the Germans at the gates of Moscow.

German channel defenses

The Germans employed Fritz Todt, the engineer who had designed the West Wall, and thousands of impressed labourers to construct permanent fortifications along the Belgian and French coasts facing the English Channel; this was the Atlantic Wall. The line consisted primarily of pillboxes and gun emplacements embedded in cliffsides or placed on the waterfronts of seaside resorts and ports. Included were massive blockhouses with disappearing guns, newsreels of which the Germans sent out through neutral sources in an effort to awe their adversaries, but the numbers of big blockhouses actually were few. Behind the line, in likely landing spots for gliders and parachutists, the Germans emplaced slanted poles, which the troops called Rommelsspargel (Rommel’s asparagus), after their commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Embedded in the sand of the beaches below the high-tide mark were numerous obstacles, varying in shape and depth, some topped with mines. Barbed wire and antitank and antipersonnel mines interlaced the whole. On the French southwestern and southern coasts similar, though less formidable, defenses were erected.

When the Allies landed in force on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy on D-Day—June 6, 1944—they found the defenses far less formidable than they had anticipated. This was attributable to a number of reasons. The Germans had constructed the strongest defenses in the Pas-de-Calais region facing the narrowest part of the English Channel and had stationed their most battleworthy troops there; demands of other fighting fronts had siphoned many of the best German troops from France; the Germans lacked air and naval support; Allied airpower was so strong that movement of German reserves was seriously impeded; landings of Allied airborne troops behind the beaches spread confusion in German ranks; and the Germans were deluded into believing the invasion was a diversion, that a second and larger invasion was to follow in the Pas-de-Calais. Only at one of the two American beaches, given the code name Omaha, was the success of the landing ever in doubt, partly because of rough seas, partly because of the chance presence of an elite German division, and partly because of the presence of high bluffs. Paradoxically, the Allies had less difficulty with the highly publicized beach defenses than they had later with field fortifications based on the Norman hedgerows, earthen embankments several feet thick and five feet high that local farmers through the centuries had erected around thousands of irregularly shaped little fields to fence their cattle and protect their crops from strong ocean winds.

Nuclear fortification

At the close of World War II most military theorists considered that permanent fortifications of the type previously employed were economically impracticable in view of their vulnerability to the incredible power of nuclear explosives and the methods, such as vertical envelopment from the air, that might be employed to reduce them. Important exceptions to this generalization were the reinforced concrete and deep tunnels used to protect strategic-missile launch facilities. The United States, the former Soviet Union, and (to a lesser degree) France, Great Britain, Israel, and China invested heavily in such defensive works. Probably the most important and most characteristic of these works was the missile silo, a tubular structure of heavily reinforced concrete sunk into the ground to serve as a protective installation and launch facility for a single intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). These silos were “hardened” to resist a calculated amount of blast and shock from a nuclear detonation. Launch crews were protected in similarly constructed underground bunkers nearby. Elaborate calculations on the number of ICBM warheads needed to destroy a hardened silo with a given degree of certainty became an integral part of the strategic calculus in the 1960s. In this way, permanent fortifications resumed their previous place of importance in strategic calculations.

Of particular concern to strategists of the United States and the Soviet Union was the vulnerability of land-based ICBMs to preemptive nuclear attack. Elaborate defensive works were proposed to protect them. One basing scheme involved a network of fortified missile shelters connected by roads or railroad tracks. Huge, closed missile transporters would shuttle the missiles from one shelter to another in such a manner that the enemy would not know which shelters were occupied and which were empty. An even more extreme plan for protecting the U.S. land-based ICBM force was designed around fratricide, the theory that multiple nuclear explosions cannot occur at the same time in close proximity to one another because the first detonated warhead triggers low-yield partial explosions in the others. The proposal, called dense pack, would exploit this phenomenon by packing a large number of super-hardened ICBM silos closely together in a single location.

Other permanent fortifications of the nuclear age were designed as headquarters sites or command and control installations. For example, a joint U.S.-Canadian project, the North American Air Defense Command (Norad), included a series of radar posts across northern Canada and Alaska to provide early warning of the approach of hostile bombers or missiles. The system and the aircraft and missiles supporting it were controlled from a vast underground complex embedded in the rock of Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo.